Nothing more perfectly illustrates the reason I started VacaView than the closure this week of the Hometown Buffet in Power Plaza.  At first it may not seem like a big deal.  Businesses open and close all the time.  But the decision-making behind this move and the abruptness of the closure should be a concern to us all.  Here’s why:

The parent company of restaurants like Hometown Buffet will open a new location anywhere in the country where their market research shows they can turn a profit that will further the overall corporate goal.  As long as the location continues to meet those goals and as long as the corporation expands its profitability, great.  But, as in the case of Ovation Brands — parent company of Hometown Buffet — the company’s profits begin to slip, locations across the country are put on the chopping block.  And just like that, BOOM. Seventy-four Hometown Buffets across the country have closed, with no notice, no “thank you” to customers, no “sorry, loyal employees”. Nothing but a sign on the locked door that suddenly greets the shocked staff in the morning.

It doesn’t even have to be a decision based on declining profits.  Equally common is the practice of spinning off properties to generate quick cash, make the operation more attractive to a potential buyer, or to “reallocate resources” as they say in corporate-speak.

The point here is that absentee owners of corporate restaurants and retail stores have no loyalty to the communities in which their locations operate.  They have no stake in the lives of their employees — they don’t even know them.  They don’t send their kids to school in these communities, don’t attend church there, and they don’t spend their money there.

For these reasons, I’m dedicated to using VacaView to promote locally-owned non-formula businesses as much as I can. It’s these businesses which have a stake in what goes on in Vacaville. These local owners have put their own sweat equity into operations that help make our town unique and interesting, economically viable and ultimately provide a quality of life we can all share and appreciate.

I live on a street that shouldn’t exist. Peaceful Glen Road, to be precise – in the hills on the northern edge of Vacaville. The very fact that this 1.6-mile stretch of pavement has its own name is a puzzle to me. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against my lane of residence. It’s every bit as lovely and bucolic as its moniker implies. My surroundings are green in the spring and rusty in the fall and there are many lovely houses here … as well as a few junky ones (this is the country, after all). No, it isn’t that.

What has confused me since the day I first laid eyes on this place during a year-long search for the perfect country home to move my family to – is the sudden, inexplicable turn that each street leading to Peaceful Glen Road takes.

Let me explain. There are two roads from which you can arrive on Peaceful Glen: Timm Road from the northeast and English Hills Road from the southwest. If you make the drive (or the walk, depending on the weather) down Timm Road toward Peaceful Glen, you will pass alfalfa fields, oak trees, some ranch houses, and one or two gated nouveau riche I’ve-got-tons-of-money-but-very-little-taste mansions. Timm then takes a winding turn to the left, straightens out for about 100 yards, and then just magically “becomes” Peaceful Glen Road. It’s weird and quite jarring for a neighborhood newbie to encounter. To my knowledge PGR didn’t do anything to earn the right to take over a perfectly good lane that was minding its own business meandering through the countryside.

Even more confusing is that Timm Road doesn’t actually end there, but instead takes a 90-degree turn to the right and continues down another road which by rights should have another name, but NO! That road is now magically Timm Road. As if the road gods and county planners got together and decided that a T-intersection complete with a stop sign and requirement to use a turn signal should have no meaning in this civil engineering vortex. A taunting road sign in this location defiantly points arrows indicating Peaceful Glen is this way and Timm is that way – when we all know better.

Equally puzzling is the English Hills Road entrance to my little slice of country heaven. The sudden unexplained turn here is to the right, also accompanied by a T-intersection and a lying road sign. To continue blissfully straight down English Hills Road is to find yourself mystically transported onto Peaceful Glen for no apparent reason. Visitors are excused for imagining themselves living out a scene from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.

My question is this: Why does Peaceful Glen Road have its own name? It’s charming, I’ll grant you, but ultimately confusing. Should it not be Timm Road, if only for the sake of Judy’s Wild Wrangler Saloon patrons who have enough to negotiate after a shot or two of Wild Turkey? Or maybe it should be English Hills Road because, well, it’s that, too. Anybody have any knowledge of the history of this? I’m interested. Maybe too much.